This poached egg, tomato, and feta dish is quick and easy to make, tasty, and hearty enough to be breakfast, brunch, lunch, or even dinner. We usually only poach as many eggs as we eat on the day we make it and save the rest to reheat and serve with fried eggs. This shakshuka is slightly spicy. For a bit more spice, I would use either two jalapeños or increase the chili powder to 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 mL). Serve with good bread or warmed pita or tortilla.

Summer is officially over, which hopefully means that even those of you without temperature controlled apartments have regained use of your oven. What better way to celebrate than to heat it up and cook lamb chops smothered in pistachios and spices.

This recipe calls for meat masala, an Indian spice mix. If you can’t find it, you can use garam or chaat masala instead. I initially got my masala spice mix when I first made chana masala, an Indian chickpea dish, and it quickly became my husband’s go-to spice when he cooks meat, fish, and even fried eggs. We sometimes put it on homemade popcorn. If you can’t find it or if you’re not convinced of how versatile masala can be, you can use a sprinkle of each of the main ingredients it contains instead: ground coriander, cumin, fennel, and black pepper.

We usually get three lamb loin chops, one each plus another to share, so the recipe yields three pork loin chops and two servings of roasted baby potatoes on the side.

Celebrate the end of summer with a tasty peach and pecan crumble! This recipe is adapted from Smitten Kitchen and it has served as a summer dessert staple for us since it was first posted. We’ve made it on several occasions, and we’ve been making quite a few changes along the way, but it is not a fussy crisp and always turns out well. The only thing to watch out for is the ripeness and natural sweetness of the peaches, which determine the amount of sugar you’ll want to add to the filling. We always eat it with vanilla ice cream, so we make it tart to compensate for the sweetness of the ice cream and add very little sugar when the peaches are already very flavorful. See the tips section for modification suggestions.

Tacos were actually our first successful home-cooked low-sodium meal two years ago. We licked our fingers clean and rubbed our bellies and patted ourselves on the back and have been making some version of them every one to two weeks since. This version is vegetarian and has our favorite source of vegetarian protein, black beans. It can easily be made vegan if you use vegan cheese or skip the cheese altogether.

We always use corn tortillas; they have much less sodium than flour tortillas. I prefer hard shell tacos and I fry mine in a pan with a little bit of oil. I have yet to perfect my method — I never seem to get the temperature and time ratio right — but they’re still always better and less likely to fall apart than store-bought hard shell tacos, even when I accidentally dry them out. The only constant I’ve noticed is that the fresher they are, the less likely I am to screw them up. My husband toasts his tortillas in the toaster oven for a couple of minutes. Check the tips section for more explicit instructions on how I heat them up.

Today marks the two-year anniversary anniversary of the beginning of my partner’s dietary restrictions and of our low-sodium cooking adventures. To celebrate, I’ve returned from my unannounced and unexpectedly long hiatus with a brunch recipe for zucchini farro fritters. Not the most celebratory of dishes, I know, but it will have to do.

We’ve made this recipe a couple of times. More often than not, we top the fritters with a fried egg and serve them with bread on the side. Since it’s just the two of us and this picky eater gets sick of eating the same thing the next day, we’ve also turned the remaining patty mixture into a stir-fry. If you have yet to master the art of patty-making, I very much feel your pain (as this picture, out of which I cropped most of the messiness, may suggest), and would not discourage you from making the patty mixture into a stir-fry right away. The mixture shrinks while it’s cooking. We start out with 4-inch patties which then shrink to a size that still fits a large fried egg. We don’t use any added salt so they turn out slightly sweet. If your diet allows it, instructions for how to incorporate salt into the fritters are included in the tips section.

An obsession with store-bought strawberry popsicles turned into an obsession with homemade strawberry popsicles a couple of years ago. We’ve made lots of other types since then but strawberry popsicles, or a variation of them, continue to be our favorite. I loved finding small pieces of fruit in store-bought ones, a fairly rare occurrence, so I’ve always made my fruit popsicles chunky.

If you don’t have a popsicle mold, you can make popsicles in shot glasses or small paper cups. See tips below for directions.

Here is a recent addition to our repertoire of favorite dishes that are quick to make. But first, a quick digression on my relationship with soup.

Soups are a huge part of my heritage. It’s the first part of every main meal. I didn’t particularly appreciate this custom growing up because, as picky as I am about food in general, I’m even pickier about soup. I was happy to eat it if it was made by my mom or grandma and even then, it couldn’t be just any soup. It basically had to be either strained chicken noodle soup with thin, homemade noodles or fresh bean soup with a tomato base.

And then I had a version of this soup in Nicaragua. It’s a tomato base soup with avocado and cheddar and, the best part, crispy tortilla strips. No, wait, the best part might be how quick it is to make.

It’s slightly tangy, likely from the tomatoes we use, and I’ve made it spicy enough to require some nose-blowing mid-meal. We add fried black beans for some extra protein because we have it as a single dish meal. Make it vegetarian by using vegetable broth instead of chicken broth and make it vegan by skipping the cheese.

Part of what makes eating this soup so fun to eat is that you continually replenish the toppings and can have crispy tortilla strips with every bite. I like letting some of the tortilla strips soak slightly, so parts are crispy and parts are soft. My partner like to eat them before they have a chance to soften.

We generally snack a lot during the day so eat relatively small meals. But serial snackers as we are, this soup that’s supposed to serve at least 5 people is only enough for two meals for the two of us.

A website update: I added a favorite tools section to the website which features some of our favorite kitchen things. The products link to the site where we bought them (or had bought from us from our registries). You’ll notice that currently everything that’s on there is from Amazon. That’s in part because I’m only an affiliate there, but in larger part because I actually do buy almost everything from them. They got me hooked, the tricksters, with a free prime account when I was a student living in a city that had no home goods stores within waking distance and I had no car. If you are a human (i.e. not a spam bot), feel free to suggest your must-haves on that page, and not just from Amazon. I look forward to any recommendations!